The walk to lectures was the same regular bustle from the same crowds of people. The world looked the same as every other morning, but felt nothing like it.
I wondered if it was in the smaller details. In how I noticed the world’s tiny features with heightened senses from the night before.
Maybe it was the buzz in the air as we approached exam season. Maybe it was the ripple of seedy gossip I’d managed to breach the surface of in order to dive in deep.
It took a few hours for me to realise that the biggest thing that was different was me.
I was different.
The new me was slavering with a weird new hope in the face of a lifetime of low expectations. The new me was thrumming with the sliver of something more. Of new potential.
But that wasn’t all of it.
There was a strange sadness in the mix creeping up my spine. And it was a strong contributor in the heady mash-up of self-loathing and relief I was juggling like a circus freak. On top of all of it was the zing of utter insanity at the promise of sixty days with the monster. Of sixty days in hell.
Only I wasn’t so sure it would be. Hell, that is. It would most certainly be sixty days with a monster.
A beautiful monster.
I’d have given anything to shout about my fucked-up predicament to someone who cared. Unfortunately, I was as short of those people as I was of most other things in life.
My regular dorm mates felt a million miles away as I avoided them around campus in my desperation to hide the changes in me. On top of everything else my college lectures were challenging, concentration slipping every five seconds at the memories of the filthy pain on the beach and the man who delivered it.
I could feel him. Deep.
I ached. Burned.
Even in the fresh light of day, I could still feel him in my stomach. Cramps taking me hard.
I shouldn’t enjoy the sensation.
Shouldn’t keep tensing myself up just to feel him there.
Still I kept a lid on it, like most things. I shuffled my notebooks and smiled my regular fake smiles like nothing was happening. I scribbled down notes in a flurry, determined to be as productive as humanly possible while I still could be.
College would be nothing more than a distant memory as soon as I got the call.
I was pretty sure I’d be ready. Waiting. Primed for all the filth in the universe and raring to do him proud. But when I stepped unsuspectingly around a corner in the library block that lunchtime I heard a low laugh that made me anything but proud.
I pressed to the wall by the term noticeboard, holding my breath at the horrible zing of what I was hearing. It came again and I shuddered. I should have run quick and bailed, but I was rooted to the spot, breaths ragged as the laughter came louder, closer.
I rarely registered voices around me. They were a blurred backdrop, meaning nothing.
But not this one.
I knew it instantly, gut churning hard as the prickles of pins and needles claimed the nape of my neck.
It was him. Mr sportswear with the gaudy gold chain from the beach last night.
Chris.
I could taste the musk of his hairy balls. Feel his grip on the back of my head as he fucked my throat until I gagged.
My stomach lurched as I remembered the scent of him. The length of him. The salt of his precum on my tongue.
How he flailed as the monster grabbed him in a headlock.
And how he ran. I remembered that too.
The way he tensed upright and fixed me in a cold hard gaze on his way by told me with no uncertainty he remembered me too. It was awkward. More than awkward. My cheeks bloomed and his jaw tightened, both of us trapped in a tunnel of discomfort that seemed to stretch on for miles in those short few seconds.
I wondered how often we’d passed each other in the months gone by and never even realised it. How many times my paths had crossed with his and left us strangers.
We were strangers no more.
The girl laughing at his side remained oblivious as he shot me a glance back over his shoulder on his way past. Was she a friend? A classmate? A girlfriend?
Had his dick been in another girl’s throat just hours before it was in mine?
I don’t know why the prospect of sucking another girl’s guy made me feel so much shittier than offering myself up to three drunk guys on a dark beach in the first place, but it did.
I guess it’s one thing to put a low value on yourself, easy done with no consequences. It’s another thing altogether to put a low value on someone else. I’d never disrespect another girl’s heart enough to trample on it and grab their boyfriend. Not intentionally.